Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  I tell Levin it makes me sorry that Sally had to face that. “Totally,” she says, “but Sally was very strategic. And she made the sacrifice. So did Tam.”

  • • •

  When I received the phone call from Terry McEntee on the afternoon Sally died, I thought only that I’d lost a friend, that the world had lost a hero. As I learned the truth and watched the debate unfold, my selfish response—Why didn’t I know?—was replaced by a more general one: Why did it matter? And then, Oh, Sally, what did it cost you to keep your secret? Her silence, I thought, was less a loss to the gay community than to Sally herself and to those around her.

  That Sally had missed her own coming-out party did not surprise me. Being the First American Woman in Space was both an honor and a burden; being the First (known) American Gay in Space might have robbed her of what little privacy she had left. Without Tam’s yearning for honesty, Sally may not have revealed a thing. Now that truth, and she, could be put to rest.

  STARDUST

  Tam and Bear dressed Sally in an old Stanford tee-shirt, a worn pair of sweatpants, a pair of socks Bear had given her, and her favorite beat-up mukluk slippers. Two weeks later, her ashes were buried next to the grave of her father on the tree-shaded lawn of tiny Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica, near the park where she often played tennis tournaments. The remains of her grandparents—the ones whose families came to California from Norway and England, the children of the Mennonites and the Methodists—rest there too. At Tam’s request, she’ll be there someday as well, sharing Sally’s headstone as they shared their life.

  Bear, with her usual eloquence and sweet irreverence, led the tiny gathering of family and close friends in a simple ceremony laced with humor:

  We’ve come here first to remember Sally—

  to remember her times of courage and unrelenting fearlessness;

  her times of humor and fun;

  to remember her as both an untamed spirit

  and a loyal partner, friend and family member;

  to remember who she was as a trailblazer and a role model,

  and who she was in her more vulnerable moments with those she held close… .

  to mourn the empty place she once filled with her wisdom and laughter,

  her commanding presence and her deep sighs of impatience.

  To mourn the true passing of the official Ride Glower.

  One family friend reminded everyone, “Physics teaches that nothing can disappear without a trace … Sally will never be lost.” And Susan Craig placed her with the elements: “Sally came from Stardust, and to Stardust she returns.”

  As they dropped rose petals on her grave, a recording of Bing Crosby played in the background, singing the song Sally learned as a child and lived as a woman: “Would you like to swing on a star?”

  14

  *

  IMPACT

  Trajectory of GRAIL spacecraft carrying MoonKAM towards Sally Ride Impact Site on lunar surface, December 17, 2012.

  What do you do after you make history? Sally decided to continue to make history.

  —Maria Zuber, October 2012

  MOONPRINTS

  Mission Control fell silent. The commands had been uploaded, the trajectory set, the final rockets burned. In a few seconds, if all went well, two robotic satellites with solar wings—they looked like flying washing machines—would crash onto the Moon, a controlled collision to avoid earlier Earthly debris and to celebrate success. With their fuel nearly spent, the twin spacecraft that had been chasing each other around the Moon for fifteen months, were done. The GRAIL scientific analyses were complete. MoonKAM had snapped its last image and the cameras were shut down. More than 240,000 miles away, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, several dozen folks in shirtsleeves and sweaters held their collective breath and stared at the bleeps crawling across their monitors—mechanical heartbeats dive-bombing the Moon, rising up and over a ridge, then on to their target. As they sped to the surface at a mile per second, a disembodied voice on the speaker counted down, “Impact in three … two … one … zero. We have lost signal.”

  For this mission, lack of communication was good news. Just before 2:30 p.m. Pacific time on December 17, 2012, Ebb and Flow smashed into the southern face of a mile-and-a-half-high mountain near a crater named Goldschmidt. Technicians burst into applause and congratulated themselves on their navigational triumph.

  Then, the surprise announcement from principal investigator Maria Zuber: To honor the memory of the woman who’d invited kids to share the journey, MoonKAM’s final resting place would be named “after our teammate Sally Ride.” Zuber had alerted me to the news earlier and fancifully imagined the distant monument as Sally Ride Massif. Her own mountain! I couldn’t help musing that apart from the tribute, Sally might have preferred a softer landing on the Moon. Then I caught the irony. They were naming a crash site for her, a controlled crash site, the perfect amalgam of her daring and reticence, and a fitting postscript to her Far Side humor. Alan Ladwig, visualizing the slippery touchdown, joked that they should call it the Sally Ride Skid Strip. Bear and Joyce, devoted Westerners, were pulling for Sally Ride Gulch. NASA, apparently short of poets that day, settled on the Sally Ride Impact Site, a thud of technocracy leavened only by Bear’s delighted message of thanks: “It’s really cool,” she said, “to know that when you look up, there’s this little corner of the Moon that’s named after Sally. We hope kids will be inspired by that as well.”

  Sally’s vehicular footprints are located near the Moon’s North Pole, some fifteen hundred miles north northwest of the spot where Neil Armstrong became the first of our species to get lunar dust on his boots in 1969. That was the landing Sally had watched as a teenager the night before her tennis tournament, so many rocket burns before. Now the two space pioneers shared cosmic turf, as well as the world’s grief. Armstrong had died just one month after Sally.

  EARTHWORKS

  The dents in the Moon left by the satellites and their cameras are huge—deep impressions that will likely remain forever. But Sally’s impact here on Earth is more profound. A child of the Eisenhower years who was inspired by Kennedy, marched against Nixon, flew under Reagan, then advised Clinton and Obama, she captured and challenged the zeitgeist on the way to changing our world. Lucky in her timing, she was ready for the moment. During her sixty-one years on the planet—minus 343 hours, 47 minutes, 32 seconds in space—she joined, then helped lead, the boldest steps yet taken to explore and protect the big blue marble that is our home. As the popular image of women progressed from Doris Day to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the real boundaries were expanded from the secretarial pool to the ocean of space, she helped prove that The Right Stuff doesn’t require the right plumbing; that girls and women can do anything they want. Sally paid a steep price for the fame that came with her adventure, but she finally learned how to use it to return the favor.

  “She wanted to show that she wasn’t a novelty, not a onetime flash in the pan,” her friend, Senator Barbara Mikulski, tells me. “And that being the first, she wasn’t going to be the only.”

  In addition to the approximately 200,000 middle school kids who took more than 100,000 images with MoonKAM, another 300,000 from more than fifty countries have used EarthKAM, its older sibling, for some 50,000 Nikon moments with our own planet. Many of the 600 UCSD undergraduates running Mission Control for both cameras have traded up to jobs at NASA or in related science fields. Today, the Sally Ride EarthKAM—another posthumous naming opportunity—continues to snap away, the longest running public engagement activity on the International Space Station.

  By the end of the 2013–2014 school year, Sally Ride Science will have held 100 Science Festivals (attended by some 85,000 youngsters), eight TOYchallenge competitions (entered by some 40,000 students), and published eighty-two books on science and science careers for kids. Its Academies or Institutes along with other programs, will have trained nearly 20,000 teachers, impacting another millio
n-plus students. Taken together, Sally Ride Science is projected to have directly touched the lives of more than two million youngsters in just thirteen years. Even more now, as the company, under a new CEO, expands digitally. But it’s not just about numbers. For many of those eight-to twelve-year-olds, Sally’s presence, and that of so many other astronauts and chemists and marine biologists that she recruited, provided the eyes-on connection that she believed helps them realize their own possibilities. It was, in her former UCSD colleague Frances Hellman’s words, “one more example that it isn’t about men in white lab coats.”

  “Sally was an ‘existence proof,’ ” explained an astrophysicist from JPL. “She proved that it was possible to work in space physics and as a space scientist and be female at the same time … that you could make it all the way to the top and accomplish amazing things in these fields—and still have a pair of ovaries.”

  A biologist who was inspired by her as a little boy wrote, “She smiled at us, and told us that happy people were doing very smart things. She told us that doing smart things could make us happy.”

  Christian Harrison, known as Taz, was the chief technological officer at MoonKAM, a Yul Brynner lookalike with his bald head, handlebar moustache and two earrings. “She had such a commanding presence. I was intimidated at first,” he says of his mild-mannered boss. “And only after you left her presence did you realize that she was really short.” It was, he says, “that ability to be bigger than you actually are.”

  And to live with contradictions. Craig Barrett, the former CEO of Intel and a fellow Stanford graduate, discloses a little-known fact about the famous astronaut, which Barrett discovered when Sally visited his wife, Barbara, and him at their Montana ranch. On an ATV outing one day, as they rode up a steep cliff, Sally stopped, got off her vehicle and huddled against the mountain. “I’m afraid of heights,” she confessed. It never kept her down. Craig Barrett worked with Sally on a number of blue-ribbon boards dedicated to expanding the reach of science education. He asks rhetorically, “What could make a life more special?”

  Barrett spoke at a national tribute to Sally at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, a public celebration of her work in May 2013, six days before what would have been her sixty-second birthday.

  She was also honored on the floor of the US Senate, in the Congressional Record and on the NASA website, where fans from around the world conveyed their sympathies:

  “Condolences from Norway, land of some of her ancestors.”

  “I hope she will enjoy her new life in outer space.”

  “I wrote to Sally when I was twelve years old. She sent me a signed photo and letter. This photo has traveled with me through college dorm rooms to my first office working at JSC.”

  “She was one sharp cookie!”

  Tom Hanks Tweeted his condolences from Hollywood (“She aimed for the stars. Let’s all do the same”), and astronaut Suni Williams downlinked hers from the International Space Station (Sally “paved the way for all of us”). Svetlana Savitskaya sent her “deepest regrets” from Russia, recalling (without divulging their secret rendezvous) “our warm and sincere communication that allowed us to understand each other without a translator.”

  Steve Hawley, now professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, and happily married for nearly a quarter-century to communications executive Eileen Hawley, released a warm and generous statement, noting, “While she never enjoyed being a celebrity, she recognized that it gave her the opportunity to encourage children, particularly young girls, to reach their full potential.” Sally, he said, “allowed many young girls across the world to believe they could achieve anything if they studied and worked hard. I think she would be pleased with that legacy.”

  In South Central Los Angeles, a new elementary school was named in honor of the distinguished alumna of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

  In addition, NASA established an internship in her honor, and the Navy is naming a new research vessel after Sally, to ply the waters and search beneath the seas for the same scientific revelations she sought in the stars.

  President Obama awarded her the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, noting her work “to keep America at the forefront of space exploration” and “to inspire young people—especially girls—to become scientifically literate and to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.” The citation called her story “[t]he tale of a quiet hero… .” And the president, speaking for all American families, said, “Today, our daughters, including Malia and Sasha, can set their sights a little bit higher because Sally Ride showed them the way.”

  • • •

  In October 2012, there was a small, private celebration of Sally’s life at the Torrey Pines Lodge in La Jolla—the event that she and Tam had talked about in the weeks before her death, and that Tam had then planned. Bear Ride, drawing on some of the scientific data her sister had shared, compared Sally to a wave. “A wave,” she said, “begins with a disturbance in the universe that travels through space and time, bringing along with it a transfer of energy.” Quoting from science writer K. C. Cole, Bear continued, “A wave spreads its influence, carrying energy and information away from the original source… . For example, when a star bursts in space it sends out ripples into the universe that’ll eventually lap up onto the shores of Earth. [A] wave keeps right on going, long after whatever started it has gone by it. Sally was that wave.”

  In Houston, at the Johnson Space Center, a tree in Sally’s honor was planted in the Astronaut Memorial Grove for all fallen astronauts. The live oak bearing a plaque with her name grows between those for Mike Lounge, with whom she’d shared the Grumman Tiger, and Pete Conrad, who had walked on the Moon while Sally joined the moratorium against the Vietnam War during her Swarthmore days. After a brief ceremony attended by her crewmates, some other TFNG friends, and a number of former and present NASA folks, I joined the line to drop a long-stemmed rose atop the freshly dug soil.

  How the landscape had changed since the day she saw that article in the Stanford Daily. When Sally joined NASA in 1978, her class of six women represented just under 10 percent of the astronaut corps; by June 18, 2013, when NASA announced a new class of eight (including four women), female astronauts in training or assigned to technical duties, plus the new astronaut candidates, represented 28 percent of the corps. Women have lived in space (Shannon Lucid, Sally’s TFNG classmate, once held the duration record after 188 days on the Russian space station). And they have died there. In all, 57 women from nine countries have flown in space. Many of the forty-five American female astronauts’ careers were either motivated or facilitated by Sally’s.

  “It never occurred to me to be an astronaut until I saw Sally giving a speech at MIT,” says Catherine (Cady) Coleman, who got her BS in chemistry the year Sally first flew. “I’d seen a lot of astronauts on TV, in pictures; none of them looked like me,” she explains. “Then I meet Sally Ride and I think, maybe that could be me.” Coleman has flown twice in the shuttle and spent more than five months on the International Space Station.

  Coleman was one of nearly two dozen female astronauts in Houston during the memorial ceremony for Sally, the first time so many, from so many different classes, had gathered together.

  Ellen Ochoa was a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford (with a BS in physics) when Sally first flew. “I’d started thinking about being an astronaut,” she tells me, “and seeing another woman, who had a physics degree like I did, made me think I wasn’t completely crazy to apply.” Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman in the world to fly in space, and ultimately completed four shuttle missions. She is currently director of the Johnson Space Center.

  See one, be one, as Billie Jean King puts it.

  “My parents took me to see The Right Stuff, Sally flew in space, and Kathryn Sullivan would do a spacewalk,” says Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, who became an astronaut in 2004 and flew on one
shuttle mission. “I was in third or fourth grade, and it really changed what I thought was possible for me.”

  “I was in elementary school when I first heard her name,” says astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who has flown on the shuttle, on the International Space Station and done three spacewalks. “And [I] grew up knowing that women could accomplish just about anything that they set their mind to.”

  Most of the newer astronauts never knew Sally personally, but many sought her out. Kate Rubins was born in 1978, the year Sally and her five female classmates went to NASA. It was the first year a girl could think about space without being regarded as if she’d just landed from Pluto, which, then, was still a planet. In fact, being an astronaut, Rubins says, “was the very first thing I can ever remember saying was what I wanted to do.” As a student at Stanford when Sally was on the faculty, Rubins snuck in to audit her Physics 6 class. “My friends were crashing fraternity parties,” she tells me laughing, “and I was crashing Sally Ride’s physics lectures!” Rubins is awaiting assignment for her first flight to the International Space Station.

  Sally’s contribution to their careers may have been best articulated by three-time shuttle veteran Pamela Melroy, one of only two women to have commanded a shuttle flight.

  “It wasn’t until after I became an astronaut that I discovered the most important gift that Sally gave me, which is that she was tremendously competent,” she says. Being first, she told the crowd at the Kennedy Center tribute, requires extraordinary performance. “The reputation of everyone who comes after you depends on how well you do. Sally opened those doors and smoothed the path for all women because she was very good at what she did.”